Using a Crisis to Redefine School Culture

Community Development

For generations, Letort has been a small town in Oklahoma, but in the last 15 to 20 years, housing developments have been sprouting up in place of the small farms and ranches that had previously been the staple of the local economy. As the growth has begun to mushroom, Letort is fast transforming into a suburb of the nearby metropolitan area, which is a difficult transition for much of the original population. According to many of the town’s old-timers, the newcomers are considered interlopers who are ruining the closeness of the community.

Currently, the demographic makeup of the Letort School District consists of 58% non-Latino White, 24% African American, and 18% Latino. Most of the Latino population lives southeast of town in “El Barrio,” which is a working-class neighborhood of single-family homes and small farms inhabited largely by families whose ancestors have been in the area for 100 years. Just beyond and east of “El Barrio” is an area commonly known as Macktown, which was settled by freed slaves shortly after the Civil War. Most of the families living in Macktown are descendants of these African Americans. The non-Latino White population is spread throughout the rest of the district and is roughly divided between the old farmers and ranchers and the new suburbanites. Just more than 46% of the student population qualifies for free or reduced lunch, and this group includes almost all of the African American population and about one half of the Latinos.

The district has six primary schools serving kindergarten through third grade, two intermediate schools with students in Grades 4 through 6, two seventh- and eighth-grade middle schools, and a single high school for Grades 9 through 12. With a great deal of thought and creativity, school district administrators have drawn attendance zones to racially balance schools whenever possible. With the exception of the primary grades, schools mirror the demographic and socioeconomic balance of the district. The high school has two campuses: a main one and a smaller vocational branch. All students attend most of their classes on the large main campus, but some students take a six-minute bus ride during the school day to and from the vocational campus for a small number of classes ranging from car mechanics to building construction.

School Relationships

Now that March is winding down, Tim Schneider is three quarters of the way through his first year as principal of Letort High School, and he feels that the year is going well. Tim has chosen to tread softly in his first year and not make many waves because the previous principal was a no-nonsense traditionalist who focused his energies almost entirely on discipline. Although he did not grow up in Letort, Tim did live in a neighboring town and has worked in the district as a teacher, coach, and intermediate-school principal for more than 20 years. The members of the school community, including the faculty, applauded Tim’s appointment as the new principal last July. Throughout the community, he is known as a “straight shooter” with a big heart for his students.

Unknown to most people in the district, Tim has big plans for raising the academic achievement level at Letort High School over the next several years. Student achievement falls just above the state average, and he recognizes that the new suburban population expects a higher level of academic excellence than the district has traditionally offered. While in the past the counseling staff was satisfied to simply get kids a high-school diploma by fulfilling the minimum requirements, the needs of the students are no longer being met by this approach. Tim believes that his students, across the board, are capable of much more than has been asked of them, and he and Superintendent Mark Scott, an old coaching buddy, hope to use the arrival of the suburbanites to increase the academic achievement of the entire school community. With the door closed, they often discuss the soft bigotry of the “old guard” who believe that encouraging ambition in the African American and Latino populations is just setting the students up to be disappointed. To be fair, the old guard feels that way about most of the non-minority students as well. Tim has spent much of his last nine months considering how to successfully change the school culture to focus on student achievement and growth rather than behavior.

In general, the students at Letort High School have a good relationship with the staff, yet there is an undercurrent of hostility that Tim sometimes sees in students’ relations with one another and with a few of the teachers. He witnessed it when the students were young and recognizes that, in Letort, this restlessness is related to both the influx of the relatively wealthy, Caucasian suburbanites and the relations among the groups that the kids label Anglo, Black, and Mexican. The students actually divide the Anglo population into “city kids” and “rednecks” to differentiate the newcomers from the children of the farmers and ranchers who have worked the land for generations. Tim, who is himself descended from small ranchers, always finds it amusing that the redneck kids are proud of that label; however, he has a much less tolerant attitude for the Mexican label. Since few of his students, or for that matter their parents, have ever been to Mexico, Tim argues that the term Mexican is a misnomer. He uses the term Hispanic or Latino for this group of students and corrects staff members and non-Latino kids when he hears them use Mexican, and Tim playfully tells Latino students that they are no more Mexican than he is German.

Tim is very concerned about the stress caused by the disparity in the income level of his students’ families. While many families in the district have lived at or below the poverty line for multiple generations, the plethora of affluent subdivisions that has sprung up in the last several years has added a new edge to managing student relations. Tim regularly has observed in classrooms in which kids living in $500,000 houses are seated next to students whose family home has dirt on the floor or no glass in the windows, and Tim attributes the recent rise in petty theft that he is dealing with to this difference in affluence. The students seem to manage their relationships well on a superficial level. For example, many sports teams have kids on either end of the financial spectrum. However, cliques in the school are strong and becoming more polarized. Tim recognizes that his kids have a wide range of experiences and realities.

The Crisis Arises

How to deal with the reality of today’s event has Tim alone in his office at 4:00 p.m. with the door closed staring at the preliminary police report on his desk. The incident started with teenagers doing what teenagers do: making an impulsive choice. Four African American, sophomore boys, Chris, Anton, Charles, and Dwayne, whose families have lived in Macktown for as long as anyone can remember, were riding in the back of the bus on the way from the main high-school campus to the auxiliary vocational campus for the Construction Trades class at 12:40 p.m. Anton and Charles are 15 years old, while Chris and Dwayne have both just turned 16. Apparently on a dare from Dwayne, Charles had dropped his pants and mooned the car that was following directly behind the bus, and the boys had laughed hilariously at the ridiculousness of the action. Mr. Paulson, the bus driver, had been oblivious to Charles’s behavior and generally has taken a tolerant view of students’ shenanigans on the bus anyway.

Unfortunately, Dr. John Beaver, the driver whom Charles mooned, had not been at all tolerant and was in fact furious. Dr. Beaver had interpreted Charles’ impulsive act to be both disrespectful and personally directed at him. In his anger, he followed the bus to the vocational campus, stomped out of his car, waited for the boys to get off the bus, and confronted them. While the police report was not yet complete, it was clear that Mr. Paulson had scurried into the school building to find help, leaving the students with Dr. Beaver.

As the four boys stepped off the bus, Dr. Beaver began yelling at them as the other 27 students stood around and watched. His rant included both profanity and racial slurs and escalated in intensity and volume as the four boys, led by Dwayne, tried to defend themselves verbally, with encouragement from the crowd of students. The boys, too, had used a great deal of profanity in their responses. After Dr. Beaver made a remark about their mothers, Anton had apparently gotten in Dr. Beaver’s face, threatened to hurt him if he did not back off, and bumped him with his chest. The older man’s response had been to push Anton away from him, and the two had gotten into a brief shoving match. When Dr. Beaver, now screaming profanity and racial slurs, pushed Anton away hard enough to knock him down, Chris had stepped up and punched Dr. Beaver in the face, knocking him to the ground. Help had arrived at that point in the form of the school’s construction teacher, Mr. Carter, who had immediately taken charge of the situation by sending all the students into the building, getting medical care for Dr. Beaver, and ordering Mr. Paulson to call Tim and 911 immediately. Less than two minutes had elapsed from the time Mr. Paulson stopped the bus to the time Dr. Beaver lay on the ground bleeding.

Decisions and Next Steps

Tim puts his head in his hands as he contemplates the gravity of the situation for his school and community. Both Anton and Chris have been arrested, and Tim knows that Chris’ mother, who is a waitress, will not have the funds to post bail for him. The District Attorney is considering charging both boys, who are football players and close to 6-feet tall, as adults. Dr. Beaver, who makes his living as a surgeon and resides in one of the newly minted subdivisions, is hospitalized with very serious eye injuries. Both print and broadcast media outlets have begun calling. Tim’s secretary reports to him that social media are alive with discussions, arguments, rants, and misinformation. As if the situation were not polarizing enough, John Beaver has a teenage daughter who is a student at the school and in the band. Tim realizes that the school community has already begun taking sides and that the gossip and misinformation that are flowing are simply exacerbating an already tense situation.

In two hours, Tim has an appointment with the superintendent to discuss the next steps that he plans to take. Superintendent Scott has made it clear that he wants to know Tim’s ideas and plans for not only dealing with the immediate crisis but also repairing damage to the school’s culture in the long run. As he begins to pace the small room, Tim contemplates the options available to him to deal with the deep divisions within his school that this incident has amplified. As he stops to stare out the window at the parking lot, Tim broods about what to say to the superintendent. He ponders disciplinary options for his students, filing trespassing charges against Dr. Beaver, whether to have a police presence on campus the next day, and how to best communicate with his teachers, but weighing most heavily on him is the need to develop a long-term strategy to address the underlying tension. As he stares out at the afternoon sky, Tim realizes that Superintendent Scott is wrong. The real issue is not repairing the school culture; it is transforming it.